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Many of the Apple (AAPL) bulls have taken to consistently complaining about the company's low price-to-earnings multiple.

Horace Dediu, an ex-Nokia (NOK) employee, who now blogs about Apple in Finland and was recently called Apple's king of analysts by Fortune, tweeted after last week's earnings call: "Stock up about 2.6% after hours. 95% growth not particularly worthy of a P/E higher than companies growing at 10%."

The stock is only marginally ahead of the NASDAQ’s return for 2011, despite the fact that it grew its earnings 95% in the most recent quarter. There are many bear arguments for why the stock has hit a ceiling (e.g., it's too big, potential iPhone 5 delays, technical head-and-shoulder patterns, a rebalancing next week).

It seems as though great earnings are not enough for Apple anymore.

Instead of playing the typical value investor card and saying that I'll be content to hold my shares and wait for the market to come around to my view, let's discuss what will have to happen for the stock to start moving again.

1. 90% Earnings growth isn't enough. It will take surprisingly better earnings. We all know that Apple will blow away its earnings estimates every quarter. There is no bump to the stock from that -- see the last two earnings periods. It takes more. Going forward, there will have to be massive earnings surprises overall or in specific products that foretell bigger things to come.

2. New products. iPad's product announcement was a great entry to the stock a year ago. No one really knew that it would take off until it started selling (although I was pounding the table about the product's importance back then). Apple doesn't come out with big product announcements like that all the time, but even the perceived small new announcements could be significant. This year, it could be Apple TV that moves the needle. It all depends on how comprehensive it is, the extent of the iTunes offering on video right away, and whether they can license AirPlay to many other manufacturers. But, all the signs suggest it could be a Netflix (NFLX) killer.

3. Super-growth in China. Through the first half of this fiscal year, Apple's China revenues amounted to 10% of their overall revenues or $5 billion. That was up 400% from Apple's Chinese revenues in the prior year. The question is how big could China grow to be out of Apple's total revenues? We don't know but the opportunities there appear to be still very large. There are only 4 stores in China, so news about new shop openings will be positive for Apple’s stock. Some kind of news about an iPhone tailored to a new LTE 4G network in China could also be a big deal. So could a low-cost version of the iPhone designed to work optimally in the pre-pay market.

4. Cheap iPhone for the low-tier of the market. iPhones now account for 50% of Apple's revenues according to last week’s earnings. Amazingly, the average selling price of an iPhone increased in the quarter to $660 from $622 a year ago. iPhone sales in China increased by almost 250% in the quarter. Most of this market – Tim Cook implied at least 90% of this market on his last call – was prepaid. So, if Apple was able to come out with a low-cost iPhone – maybe specifically catering to the prepaid market to make it have mass appeal in China – it could move the needle even more significantly for future iPhone sales.

5. News about significant corporate adoption of the iPad. There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence that large corporate customers are adopting the iPad – especially hospitals and law firms. On the last earnings call, Cook pointed out that 88% and 75% of Fortune 500 companies are deploying or testing iPhone and iPad respectively. We also have some evidence that some iPad competitors like Motorola’s (MMI) Xoom are dying on the vine. These are all little vignettes of data. If they can be woven together with some striking data point that clearly shows enterprises are deploying iPad in a clear way that differs from Apple’s competitors, that will move the needle for Apple’s stock.

6. 100 million iPads. Related to corporate adoption, I believe the market will react to the news that Apple has sold 100 million iPads. It will happen by the end of 2011 or in early 2012. When it does, it should be evident that this device has had a profound impact on the way business is done but also on the strategic importance of Apple’s products among a wide-range of enterprises and consumers.

7. A parabolic move in the success of the Mac. We know that Macs have been on a tear. In the last quarter, Mac growth was 76% in Asia Pacific and 25% in the Americas. These growth rates are well-ahead of the market’s growth rates. It’s clearly the halo effect taking hold. Happy iPhone and iPad customers are replacing their old PCs with Macs. But the real parabolic shift – or upgrade cycle – hasn’t really even begun yet. There are now 189 million iOS-enabled devices out there. Yet, the March quarter’s record Mac sales were only 3.76 million. The bulk of those iOS users will convert to Macs before this upgrade cycle is over.

8. A big acquisition that is unexpected. Apple added $6 billion to its cash hoard last quarter. It’s now up to $66 billion and it will be over $80 billion by the end of the year. And that is after signing a bunch more pre-paid supply chain agreements to lock-up the tablet market even more than they have already. I see a few bloggers stating that Apple should pay a large dividend. It won’t happen – with or without Steve Jobs. These guys knew they were going to use their cash to play offense against all the other tablet competitors when they had an 18 month lead on the industry. They will also use this cash to do 1 or more big acquisitions in the future. I’ve argued before that Apple should look seriously at Facebook and be willing to pay up to $100 billion for it. I stand by that argument – and believe strongly that, if such a deal were to happen at that price, Apple’s price would go up the next day, not down. I also think that Apple could surprise a number of people with an acquisition in the payments space (for reasons I’ll describe below). MasterCard (MA) and Discover Financial Services (DFS) would be the most attractive targets for them.

9. A move into payments space. This has been another growth opportunity area which I’m very eager to see what Apple does: mobile payments, especially using near-field communication (NFC). I believe it will be a game-changer for Apple. If Apple were to capture 1% of Global Retail Sales in 2010 by processing the transaction, it would be an additional $80 billion in revenue for the year. That kind of revenue would nearly double their revenues that they reported last week. When you’re a $326 billion company already, it’s imperative that you find huge growth opportunities to keep fueling your growth. Apple will not be able to avoid getting into mobile payments space. But it will take more than just linking iTunes to your mobile phone. There is a whole other aspect of mobile payments processing, distribution, risk management, and administration that comes with it. That’s why I think someone like a MasterCard would be a great fit.

[At the time of publication, Jackson had a long position in AAPL and a short position in NFLX.]